'Tell Those Secrets in a New, Funny, Gentle Way'

From the tribute to Pee Wee Russell written by Whitney Balliett (Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001) after the clarinetist’s death in 1969: 

“His style – the chalumeau phrases, the leaps over the abyss, the unique why? tone, the use of notes that less imaginative musicians had discarded as untoward – was paradoxically, his final snare and his glory. People laughed at it. It was considered eccentric, and because eccentricity, the kindest form of defiance, baffles people, they laugh. But those who don’t laugh understood that Russell had discovered some of the secrets of life and that his improvisations were generally successful attempts to tell those secrets in a new, funny, gentle way.”

 

A rare and beautiful word, “chalumeau” refers to the lowest register played on the clarinet. You don’t have to know Russell’s music to appreciate the celebratory spirit in Balliett’s words and the larger statement he is making about art and artists. Russell was an eccentric – that is, he worked away from the center. It’s easy to laud artists for their putative eccentricity, when too often it’s merely calculated attention-seeking --  a trombonist making fart sounds with his horn or a poet scorning punctuation and capital letters. The latter example suggests that willful eccentricity can soon become trite. Balliett might have written a similar description of Lester Young or Thelonious Monk. The latter never sounds as though he’s the “wild and crazy” guy at the party. Listen to “Blue Monk,” in which Russell joins Monk at the 1963 Newport Festival.

 

Being gifted and eccentric is rare. Who are the Pee Wee Russells of literature? The first writer who comes to mind is the English novelist Henry Green. Perhaps Max Beerbohm. Marianne Moore. Laurence Sterne. There’s much to be said in favor of such writers, but theirs is an unlikely and difficult way to produce first-rate work, and imitating them is fatal.